Anti-bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EWHC Case Content
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot verification system, on its England and Wales High Court case pages. The system uses a Hashcash-style computational challenge to deter AI companies and mass scrapers from aggressively harvesting legal content. Individual users experience negligible delay, but bulk scraping becomes economically impractical at scale. The deployment is framed as an interim measure while fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers are refined.
“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”
About this source
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the open-access publisher of UK case law. The England and Wales Recent Decisions feed aggregates every newly published judgment from the High Court, Court of Appeal, and specialist divisions: Chancery, Commercial Court, Administrative Court, Family, Patents, Technology and Construction. Around 200 published opinions a month. BAILII is the closest thing to a free Westlaw for UK judgments and the standard citation source for academic and practitioner work that does not have a paid database licence. GovPing tracks each new decision as it appears, with the case name, court, judge, and citation. Watch this if you brief English commercial litigation, follow Chancery and TCC trends, or research UK judgments from outside a paid platform.
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work verification system using Hashcash principles, on its England and Wales High Court case pages. The system imposes a small computational burden on each page visit that scales dramatically when attempted by mass scrapers or AI data collectors. The stated goal is to reduce server load from aggressive scraping while legitimate human users experience minimal disruption.
Affected parties include automated legal research tools, AI training data collectors, and any systems that programmatically access BAILII case pages without disabling the proof-of-work challenge. Developers of such tools should ensure JavaScript is enabled and that anti-fingerprinting plugins like JShelter are configured to allow the domain, as Anubis requires modern JavaScript features to function.
Archived snapshot
Apr 24, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
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